[LC response] To Guus Schreiber

Dear Guus,

Thank you for your comment
      <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swd-wg/2009Jan/ 
0084.html>
on the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language last call drafts.

OWL 2 is a successor of OWL and not only a successor of OWL DL. You  
are right, however, in pointing out that this is not made  
sufficiently clear in some documents, and that they sometimes seem to  
suggest that this is not the case.

In order to address this problem the WG has added a Document Overview  
and has revised several of the other documents. The Document Overview  
provides a high level view of the design, making it clear that OWL 2  
refers to the language as a whole, that an OWL 2 ontology can be  
equivalently seen as an RDF graph or as an abstract structure (an  
instance of the ontology class), and that ontologies can be  
interpreted using either the RDF-Based semantics or the Direct  
semantics (see our response to Frank van Harmelen [1] for more on  
this topic).

Regarding the presentation of the material, the Structural  
Specification and Functional-Style Syntax document, which is the core  
reference for language features and usage, has been revised so that  
the features are illustrated using examples in both functional and  
triple based syntaxes. The New Features and Rationale document is not  
intended as a language reference, but documents the rationale for the  
new features of OWL 2. In order to keep the document short only the  
more compact functional syntax is provided. This document is,  
however, not yet at last call, and so is still subject to change.

We are grateful for your supportive comments regarding some of the  
new features of OWL 2, and we hope that the changes we have made  
address your concerns about the presentation.

Please acknowledge receipt of this email to <mailto:public-owl- 
comments@w3.org> (replying to this email should suffice). In your  
acknowledgment please let us know whether or not you are satisfied  
with the working group's response to your comment.

Regards,
Ian Horrocks
on behalf of the W3C OWL Working Group

Received on Thursday, 19 March 2009 12:13:58 UTC